Born to Dance

Rev. Jeffrey Symynkywicz, March 23, 2008

Did you ever notice how the eggs on our church’s Easter tree seem
to dance, as they hang there on their branches? (If you have a chance, do
come up later and take a closer look at our tree, especially if you haven’t
done so for a few years. It really is a lovely sight.) They look to me like
they’re dancing. Gently swaying; lightly bobbing up and down if a
light breeze brushes by; or hanging on for dear life if some major crisis
befalls them: if a gust of wind sweeps through the sanctuary, or if someone
brushes against the tree, and sends its branches shaking.

Dancing eggs each with a precious name; some of people still here; others
of souls now long gone. Each dancing along the branches of a great tree—a
world tree; a tree that unites the generations; a tree on whose branches
past, present, future blend.

We are each like precious, fragile buds along different branches of
the tree of life.

We are each dancing together, like shining fragments, in a sky filled
with light.

Out of eternity we have come, and into eternity we will return—and
our dance here on this Earth is but a little thing, God knows: three score
years and ten, maybe a little more; maybe even four score or more, given
the advances of modern medicine. But however long, it is but a tiny glimmer
between those two eternities.

Easter is our faith’s proclamation that we are part and parcel
of those eternities: We are joined with all that come before, tied together
through mystic chords of memory, from generation to generation. We are
part of all that will come after, and even after we are gone, our lives
will reverberate in the lives of others; our heart will yet sound in the
beating heart of the universe.

The soul’s horizon widens,
Past, present, future blends,
And rises on our vision
the life that has no end.

We have been born into a never-ending dance of all souls, and sometimes
it’s a danse macabre, and sometimes it’s a dance
sublime—but either way, it is a dance of life upon life—dream
upon dream—age after age.

Just like those eggs on that dear tree of ours: Each one representing
a precious human soul: a man, or woman, or child who had shared his or
her being—his or her creativity—his or her inner fire-- his
or her joy—and now is sharing this Easter morning
with us. There in a nutshell (or, in an eggshell, actually) is what Easter
truly is all about—indeed, what life is all about (for me at least,
and I know for many of you): It is about being part of that great river
of memory and hope-- that glorious stream of living souls that flows down
through the ages, timelessly, deathlessly. It is about dancing on the
eternal tree of life—dancing with eternity—with one another—with
every soul—with all time.

None of us ever finishes our ministry upon this Earth when our time comes
for us to go. None of us ever becomes the full person that the Hand of
Life intended us to be. We will never be finished in our search for spiritual
and emotional completeness.

The great Renaissance artist Raphael was so moved by the essential incompleteness
of human existence that when he painted his most famous portrait of Christ,
he kept the lower left hand corner empty—unfinished—to symbolize
the unfinished part of every life, even the life of Jesus himself.

Here is the essence of our human condition:

Our little lives are short. Even the grandest, most powerful, most transforming,
most revolutionary human life is short. (Jesus himself lived only 33 years,
we are told.) Yet, we dance with one another on the branches on a Tree
of Life which is eternal and immortal.

Easter moves us because it speaks to both of those conceptions. It is
a promise of truth and beauty flowing freely now, within this
life, with its cycles and seasons. But Easter is also a declaration of
a hope which transcends the bounds of time and space; it is a declaration
of our hope in the immortality of our spirits—the eternal nature
of our love—and of our ability “To see a world in a Grain
of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold infinity in the palm of [our]
hand And Eternity in an hour.”

As Blake said, it is in the simplest treasures that we glimpse eternity
most profoundly: the simplest touch upon our shoulder or across our cheek;
the softest whisper of truth and meaning in our souls; the gentlest notes
of music, music of the birds, music of the breeze, music of the laughter
of those we love. The pain of loss. The miracle of healing. An unquenchable
hope for the future. Constant reminders of how precious each moment truly
is. Constant reminders of why we are here, and of how we were born to
dance.

At Easter, we celebrate our place in the Earth’s rebirth, and know
that it is but symbol and sign of our soul’s rebirth in all eternity.

And, of course, eternity does not simply mean “a long time”.
Eternity is beyond all time. Eternity is the dimension of the divine,
pouring itself forth into our lives. It is the power and presence of God
reverberating through these little lives of ours.

Easter reminds us about our place in this great dance of the
cosmos—our place at the great vortex between the human and the divine.
As Judy Cannoto writes in her book, Quantum Grace: “It
is [our] refusal to allow our connection to the human and the divine to
be broken which saves us.”

So at Easter we reach out fully to embrace this wondrous world with its
cycles and seasons and its refulgence and abundance. And we reach out
expectantly to embrace the Holy One in whom we live and move and have
our being, and whose eternal voice echoes timelessly in our souls: “Behold,
I make all things new.”